Having been born and raised on the banks of the South Platte River, I grew up dealing with floods. As a child in the 1940s, I remember my parents moved my sisters and I to Grandpa Sylvester’s home, because they were concerned about rising flood waters.

Over the past 76 years of my life on this farm, I’ve learned to take floods in stride. Knowing what the potential high water mark could be, and understanding the river quite well, I couldn’t see any reason why the river would ever exceed that.

This changed in 1973. When living in Wyoming, I heard radio announcer Paul Harvey say, “The largest crest of flood water came down the South Platte at 27,000 cubic feet per second.” It was April 6, 1973. Floods of 1965, 1969, 1976, 1980, 1996 and 1997 were all normal floods, in that they never exceeded the historic high water mark until 1973.

The flood of Friday, Sept. 13, 2013, is now on record as being more than double 1973’s CFS and possibly triple the historic high water mark.

What has changed on the Front Range to cause this? Here are some possibilities:

1. The shutdown of senior wells on the upper end (fully adjudicated by about 1879) of the Platte overhydrated the entire upper end. Dr. Regan Waskom recently reported the Front Range along the South Platte River basin has been over-augmented (hydrated).

2. Rapid growth on the Front Range; more roofs, parking lots, streets and more, have created less area for water to quickly soak into the soil.

3. Some 500,000 acre feet of water brought to the Front Range from trans-mountain diversions. With this additional water for agriculture/crops, a majority of this same water is now being used by cities for domestic households, trees, lawns, golf courses and other shrubs. All are nice to look at, but have a cooling effect on the temperatures, thereby putting more evaporated moisture into the air and increasing the humidity.

Everyone knows water begets water. The heavy rainfall and flood in September shows us how man-made over-hydration has dramatically changed the picture of rainfall and landscape of the South Platte basin. With this there is more evaporation accumulation. One scientist reported that Boulder had water vapor that at times was “150 to 200 percent more than normal.” Upslope winds are common along the Front Range, and this abundance of new moist air is too heavy to make the leap over the Continental Divide. Trapped along the Eastern side of the Continental Divide, is has nowhere to go but down.

So, when conditions like a cold front are just right, a collision ensues and we get horrendous rains such as:

3. July 28, 1997: A 12-inch rainfall west of Fort Collins created the flash flood that killed five people and caused more than $200 million in damage, including the library at Colorado State University.

4. Sept. 13, 2013: What has been tagged as a 1,000-year flood resulted from heavy rains from the mountains near Nederland to the hills west and north of Fort Collins, dumping 12 to 18 inches. The result: millions in property damage and the tragic loss of eight people.

So I pose the following question: What percentage could this recent epic rain and floods be attributed to an act of God, and what percentage can be attributed to actions by man?

Charles W. Sylvester is a fourth-generation farmer in LaSalle. He is retired general manager of the National Western Livestock Show and Rodeo.